Philosophie-Delor

- Philosophy – Delor: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/
- Philosophy: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/
- A Reading List for Critical Thinking: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/reading_list/
- What Is Philosophy: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/what-is-philosophy/
- What Is Quality: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/what-is-qualety/
- Minimum Standards for Productive Philosophical Discussion: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/philosophy/mindeststandards/
- Ethics: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/ethics/
- Hume’s Is–Ought Problem and Its Solution: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/ethics/hume_is_ought/
- Criticism and Reviews: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/
- The Misconception of Utilitarianism: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/utilltarissmus/
- Professor Hanno Sauer: The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/sauer_moral/
- How not to Prove Hume's Law: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/critics/how-to-prove-humes-law/
- Satirical Criticism: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/
- As Free as a Turnspit: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/kants-idealissmus/
- The Two Dogmas of Königsberg-7: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/kants-imperativ/
- Expressivism: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/expressivism/
- Parfit and the Normative Parallel World: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/parfit/
- Thick Rules: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/thick-rules/
- The Gospel of Searl: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/satire/the-gospel-of-john/
- Publications: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/publications/
- About the Author: https://philosophie-delor.github.io/en/about/

# Derek Parfit and the Normative Parallel World

*Or: How to Build an Entire Floor and Claim It Isn't a Storey*

## 1. The Invisible Elevator

Imagine a building. A perfectly normal building. Ground floor, first floor, second floor. Everything comprehensible, everything accessible, everything connected by doors and stairs. One day, the architect announces there is yet another floor. It lies somewhere between the first and second floors. You cannot enter it, see it, or measure it. It has no windows, no walls, no physical extension. But it is definitely there. It is objectively there. It is even there *in a robust sense*.

"Wait," you say. "That sounds like a floor."

"No," says the architect. "It has no structural implications."

That is roughly what Derek Parfit's metaethics reads like.

## 2. What Parfit Claims

Derek Parfit (1942–2017) was one of the most influential moral philosophers of recent decades. His magnum opus *On What Matters* spans three volumes and nearly two thousand pages. The central thesis can be summarized in four points:

First: moral judgments are beliefs that can be true or false—not mere expressions of sentiment like "Boo!" or "Hooray!".

Second: some of these beliefs are actually true, and objectively so—independently of what anyone thinks about them.

Third: normative concepts such as "ought" and "good" are *irreducible*—that is, they cannot be reduced to natural, scientifically describable properties. "Good" is "good," and that is the end of the matter.

Fourth—and here things get peculiar: these normative truths carry *no ontological implications*. "Ontology" is the philosophical term for the question of what exists, what there is, what belongs to the basic furniture of reality. So Parfit is saying: there are objective moral truths, but they do not belong to the basic furniture of reality.

Read that fourth point again. Objective truths that hold independently of anyone's attitudes—yet do not belong to reality. If this strikes you as someone saying "This object is definitely heavy, but it has no physical properties"—then you have already spotted the problem.

## 3. The Dualism That Refuses to Be One

*In a galaxy far away, there was once a planet whose inhabitants had two kinds of weather: visible weather, which could be measured and predicted, and moral weather, which was objectively fixed but could not be detected by any instrument. On Monday it rained morally; on Tuesday the ethical sun was shining. The inhabitants knew this because they simply felt it. When a visitor asked why the moral weather never correlated with the visible weather, they patiently explained that the two kinds of weather occurred on different levels and had nothing to do with each other. When the follow-up question came—why, then, one should carry an umbrella when it was raining morally—an embarrassed silence ensued.*

What Parfit actually introduces is a dualism—a division of reality into two levels. "Dualism" here means: reality allegedly consists of two fundamentally different layers that cannot be reduced to one another. On one side stands empirical reality: everything science can investigate—atoms, brains, behaviour, causes and effects. On the other side float normative truths that are supposed to be independent of this reality.

Parfit calls this second level "non-ontological." This changes things about as much as a sign on a duck reading "This is not a duck." If something is objectively and attitude-independently the case, then it *exists* in some relevant sense—and whoever claims it exists but without "ontological implications" has built a new floor and refuses to enter it into the blueprints.

## 4. "Irreducible": How to Seal a Concept Against Criticism

*The galactic insurance company Pain & Sons once offered a policy that covered absolutely everything. Fire, theft, flooding, existential dread, and the sudden collapse of the laws of nature. When a customer filed a claim—his house had burned down—he was informed that fire in the insurance-relevant sense was irreducible: it could not be reduced to chemical oxidation processes. Whether his house had actually burned was therefore a question chemistry could not answer. The customer asked which discipline was responsible. "Rational insight," said the claims adjuster. "And? Do you have any?" "No," said the customer. "Then I'm afraid I can't help you," said the claims adjuster, and hung up.*

Parfit's key term is "irreducibly normative." It means: normative truths cannot in principle be reduced to natural, empirically describable states of affairs. "Good" is not a shorthand description of a natural property; "ought" is not a causal statement in disguise. They form their own category.

This sounds like a substantive thesis but primarily serves a protective function. For "irreducible" in plain language means: by definition not accessible through empirical means, not verifiable by observation, not replaceable by naturalistic reconstruction. If someone comes along and says "I can show that 'good' can be understood as a goal-relative property—good *for* a subject, *relative to* a goal, *under* given circumstances," the answer is: "That cannot be, because 'good' is irreducible."

This is what Karl Popper called *immunization against criticism*: one defines the object such that no argument and no observation can touch it, then declares the resulting invulnerability as evidence of its special status. Popper formulated the methodological rule never to rescue a threatened system by any "conventionalist stratagem." In Parfit's case, the stratagem becomes the foundation of the entire architecture.

Or, to make it vivid: imagine someone claims a dragon lives in their garden. You look—no dragon. "It's invisible," says the owner. You sprinkle flour on the ground—no footprints. "It hovers." You bring a thermal camera—no heat signature. "Its fire is cold." Carl Sagan made this example famous. Parfit's irreducibly normative truths are the invisible dragon of metaethics. For every method one proposes to test them, it turns out they are by definition inaccessible to precisely that method. At some point one must ask what distinguishes an invisible, hovering, cold-fire-breathing dragon from no dragon at all.

## 5. The Alleged Refutation of Naturalism—or: Moore Reloaded

*There was once a logician who proved that dogs cannot fly. His proof went like this: he defined "flying" as "moving without ground contact, and specifically not in a dog-like manner." He then demonstrated in thirty pages of formalism that dogs, under this definition, cannot fly. When someone objected that a dog in an airplane does move without ground contact, the logician explained that this was not "real flying" because it could be explained in a dog-like manner. The proof was formally correct. The audience was impressed. The dogs kept flying.*

Parfit's main strategy is an argument by elimination: he argues against all competitors in turn—naturalism, noncognitivism, error theory, metaphysical non-naturalism—and concludes that his position is the only one left standing. Particularly important is his "refutation" of naturalism, the position that moral facts are natural facts.

Parfit brings two arguments against naturalism. The first, the "Normativity Objection," holds: normative properties cannot be identical with natural properties because normative concepts are irreducibly normative. The second, the "Triviality Objection," holds: if naturalism were true, then moral-natural identity claims would have to be trivial—but they are not.

Both arguments share a remarkable feature: they are sophisticated reworkings of G. E. Moore's famous *Open Question Argument* from 1903. Moore had claimed that "good" is a simple, unanalyzable concept—and that every attempt to equate "good" with a natural property commits a "naturalistic fallacy." The problem with Moore's argument: it presupposes what it sets out to prove. Moore *defines* "good" as irreducible and then concludes that it cannot be reduced. That is a circular argument disguised as a demonstration.

Parfit commits exactly the same error, only in more elegant dress. His entire "refutation" of naturalism stands or falls with the assumption that normative concepts are irreducible. But this is not a discovery; it is a stipulation. Anyone who instead understands "good" as a *relational* predicate—something is good *for* a subject, *relative to* a goal, *under* given circumstances—is untouched by either the Normativity Objection or the Triviality Objection. That "good" only makes sense relative to a goal is not an exotic novelty but the position already worked out by Mario Bunge and Martin Mahner: a value judgment has the form "a is valuable for organism b with respect to c under circumstances d with goal e and in light of a state of knowledge f."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy accordingly notes that Parfit's arguments against naturalism fail in much the same way as Moore's Open Question Argument. Parfit has not refuted naturalism. He has shown that under the assumption that normative concepts are irreducible, naturalism does not work. That is roughly like proving that water cannot be H₂O by defining "water" as "something that has no chemical composition."

## 6. Synthetic A Priori Judgments: Logical Bankruptcy

*In a particularly advanced civilization, thinking had once been perfected to the point where one could discover how the world was constituted by thought alone. There was no longer any need to look, to measure, or to experiment. One sat in a comfortable armchair, thought very hard, and then knew. This worked splendidly until two thinkers arrived at opposite results. Since it had been agreed that looking was unnecessary, there was no way to determine who was right. After some debate, it was decided that the question would have to remain open. The civilization no longer exists, incidentally, but that is due to something entirely different.*

Since empirical means are ruled out by definition, the only epistemic access to Parfit's normative truths is what he calls "rational insight" and "intuitive convergence." One is supposed to arrive at substantive truths about the world through pure thought—without empirical basis. This sounds elegant. It has only one catch: it is logically impossible.

What is being demanded here are *synthetic a priori judgments*. That sounds unwieldy but means something simple: statements that are simultaneously independent of experience ("a priori") and say something new about the world ("synthetic," i.e. content-extending—as opposed to "analytic," i.e. merely concept-unpacking). Moritz Schlick and the Vienna Circle established the decisive point as early as the 1920s: judgments that hold independently of all experience can only be *analytic*—they merely make explicit what is already contained in the concepts employed. "All bachelors are unmarried" says nothing new about the world; it unfolds the meaning of "bachelor." Hans Hahn worked through the same point for mathematics in 1933: mathematical truths too do not extend our knowledge of the world but explicate the consequences of definitions and axioms.

A judgment that is both experience-independent *and* content-extending is ruled out. Either it says something about the world—then it must be testable against experience. Or it is true independently of experience—then it is a conceptual truth without world-content. You cannot have both.

Immanuel Kant had pursued exactly this project: to show that synthetic a priori judgments are possible. The project failed, not for contingent reasons but because it *cannot* work given the structure of the matter. W. V. O. Quine then showed in 1951 that the analytic/synthetic distinction itself is untenable, which makes things even worse. But one does not need Quine. The simple point suffices: from pure thought alone, no new facts about the world follow.

Parfit inherits this problem without recognizing it as one. And the fact that his hoped-for "intuitive convergence" does not empirically obtain—humanity remains spectacularly divided on fundamental moral questions after several millennia of debate—does not improve the situation but confirms the point.

## 7. The Argument by Elimination: Sherlock Holmes in an Infinite Universe

*A detective had a method of solving cases by elimination. He questioned all suspects, ruled them out one by one, and the last one was the culprit. This worked splendidly as long as he operated in a closed room with a known number of persons. One day he was asked to solve a case in a city of eight million inhabitants. He began eliminating. After thirty years he had ruled out two thousand suspects and declared he was making good progress.*

Parfit's main argumentative strategy is precisely this procedure: he refutes (or believes he refutes) naturalism, noncognitivism, error theory, and metaphysical non-naturalism, and concludes that his position is the only one remaining.

This works in a closed room with a finite and known number of possibilities. But Parfit operates in an *open theory-space*—the number of possible reconstructions of normative concepts cannot be exhaustively enumerated. That he has examined five positions shows at best that these five positions have problems. It does not show that the sixth, seventh, or hundredth position must fail. And it certainly does not show that his own position is true.

Moreover—as we saw in section 5—his "refutation" of naturalism is itself flawed, because it presupposes Moore's irreducible concept of good as a premise. If this premise falls, the argument by elimination falls with it.

## 8. The Self-Contradiction: Norms That Want Nothing to Do with the World but Are Supposed to Change It

*There was once a navigation system that prided itself on being connected to no map whatsoever. It calculated routes from pure reason, independently of the actual location of roads. The routes were objectively correct—that was beyond question. They merely led occasionally through house walls, across rivers without bridges, and once straight through an active volcano. When the navigation system was asked whether it might perhaps be useful to take actual geography into account, it explained that geography was a natural fact and irreducibly irrelevant to route calculation.*

And now to the real problem, which cannot be repaired. Normative statements—sentences of the form "You ought to do X"—claim to say something about actions in the real world. They concern real people, real decisions, real consequences. A norm that does not concern any action in the world is not a norm but a sentence without an address.

At the same time, Parfit claims that the normative truths underlying such statements are neither derivable from empirical facts nor testable against empirical facts.

This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. Either there is a lawful connection between the normative and the empirical level—then normative truths are empirically testable, and the irreducibility thesis collapses. Or there is no such connection—then normative truths cannot make claims about actual states of affairs, and they are worthless as action guidance.

You cannot have both: action-relevance *and* empirical insulation. The former demands a bridge to the world; the latter forbids it.

## 9. Not Even Wrong

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say of particularly bad theories: "That is not even wrong." A theory that is wrong at least says something definite about the world—just something that does not hold. A theory that is "not even wrong" says nothing at all: it is constructed such that no observation and no argument can touch it.

Parfit's non-realist cognitivism is not even wrong. It introduces a second level of reality and calls it "non-ontological." It shields its core concepts by definition against criticism. It demands a form of cognition that is logically impossible. Its argument by elimination operates in an open space while presupposing precisely the Moorean conceptual stipulation it purports to demonstrate. And it contradicts itself the moment it claims action-relevance.

*On What Matters* spans nearly two thousand pages. One can commend the industriousness and work ethic behind such a project. But that would be rather like praising the designer of an airplane for its excellent swimming properties—even though it cannot fly.

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## References

- Albert, Hans (1991). *Traktat über kritische Vernunft*. Mohr Siebeck. (Original work published 1968)
- Bedke, Matthew (2019). What Normativity Cannot Be. *Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy*, 16(1), 1–25.
- Bunge, Mario (1989). *Treatise on Basic Philosophy. Volume 8: Ethics: The Good and the Right*. D. Reidel Publishing Company.
- Bunge, Mario & Mahner, Martin (2004). *Über die Natur der Dinge*. S. Hirzel Verlag.
- Hahn, Hans (1933). *Logik, Mathematik und Naturerkennen*. Einheitswissenschaft, Bd. 2. Gerold & Co.
- Moore, George Edward (1903). *Principia Ethica*. Cambridge University Press.
- Parfit, Derek (2011). *On What Matters*, Vols. 1–2. Oxford University Press.
- Parfit, Derek (2017). *On What Matters*, Vol. 3. Oxford University Press.
- Popper, Karl (1959). *The Logic of Scientific Discovery*. Hutchinson. (Original work published 1934)
- Quine, Willard Van Orman (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. *The Philosophical Review*, 60(1), 20–43.
- Sagan, Carl (1995). *The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark*. Random House.
- Schlick, Moritz (1930). Gibt es ein materiales Apriori? *Wissenschaftlicher Jahresbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universität zu Wien*.